2011 Payrolls By Division

Five days ago the Associated Press published 2011 payrolls for the 30 teams based on information sent by the clubs to the commissioner's office. They explain:

Figures are for 40-man rosters and include salaries and pro-rated shares of signing bonuses, earned incentive bonuses, non-cash compensation, buyouts of unexercised options and cash transactions. In some cases, parts of salaries that are deferred are discounted to reflect present-day values.

$2,999,557,280 was spent in total, so the $100MM or so spent by the Rangers or Mariners is about average. The Yankees, of course, led with a $216MM figure. That's 4.85 times the Royals' payroll, which was the lowest at about $45MM. Maury Brown has quality analysis of over at The Biz of Baseball. Below I thought it'd be interesting to break down the spending by league and division.

Better? 2 titles to 0 in last decade isn’t better….
And the rays are a good club, but it took yes of failure to get those draft picks that made them good….
Give most teams those picks and they wouldn’t need a high payroll either…
Apples and oranges man…dig a little deeper for understanding before you comment

If you look at it, the contracts are all the same. They back loaded the heck out of all them. They aren’t spending much this year or next and then their payroll is going wayyyyyyy up. I think they did the contracts like that to sign Pujols, whoopsie.

Reyes is getting $10M, Bell $9M, and Buehrle $6M. You’re also looking at a $4M raise for Hanley, since I presume this isn’t factoring his trade bait status. Nolasco and Johnson are also getting raises, but they are mostly getting cancelled out by Vasquez and a few others coming off the books. Still, that’s $30M payroll expansion (or about $6M per team) before they’ve even gone to arb with around a dozen players.

That would push the divisional average to about $100M, so I probably wasn’t all that far off if my napkin math is anywhere near accurate.

But the O’s wouldn’t be different and I sincerely doubt the Yankees would drop to a 65 or so win team with a lower payroll. You can’t leave out the fact that the top 6 highest paid players on their team make up over half the payroll.

This. These hypotheticals are fun to argue but Yankees’ haters think “take away ____ and they suck” without thinking the only time this would happen would span a few years and, like they did in the days of the reserve clause, the days before FA, the days before revenue sharing/luxury tax, they would have to find a new method.
Not to mention as I previously stated, If you want to pick and choose (which you can do in hypotheticals), A-Rod, Burnett, Soriano and Jeter make what, 70 million? Remove Soriano and Burnett and nothing changes. Remove A-Rod and Jeter, and you can probably replace their production over the next few years for way less than 40-45 million. Plus, if there was a salary cap, guys like Mo would never get 15 million on an open market even though they are great at what they do. It’s a totally unfair statement to make for so many reasons.

In fairness, the Yankees have pretty much always used their monetary advantage as a significant part of their strategy. From buying Babe Ruth’s contract to the days of using the Athletics’ crooked owner as a discount bin for young talent.

Just because Harry Frazee wanted to use financial gain for extra-curricular activities and decided to give up his best pitcher for it, does not mean it’s the Yankees’ fault they took the bait. Not to mention, I’m fairly certain those Yankees’ teams might have been decent with or without Ruth. They had some, um, other talent on those teams.

Just like what Cashman has done a few time in the past seasons except for 2009 and has managed to win again and again their division? Just in 2011 alone they were the best team in the AL in terms of record.

Oh come on now it’s the holidays, be a tiny bit generous — give him closer to the MLB average of $100m. I mean, the team would still probably finish in last place but at least he wouldn’t feel cheated.

Ned Colletti, GM of a big market city, team payroll in the $100 million mark, and while technically the Dodgers were not a last place team, they’ve been a 2nd to last place team twice and have only won 90 games once. Point is, I don’t think you can argue Colletti is as overrated if not more than Cashman is.

I did not bring up the bankruptcy issue because it was not relevant to the point I was making. The point I was making is that the Dodgers managed three postseason appearances in four years with a payroll close to the MLB 30-team median. And for the record, the bankruptcy is an irrelevant factor in 2010 and 2011. The relevant factor there was the divorce (filed at the end of the 2009 season) and the fight over the ownership of the team.

That’s such a silly statement. He doesn’t have that money to work with so you have no idea how he would do with it. That’s like saying, man, you get all A’s in your classes, imagine how crappy of a student you would be if they were AP.

Comparing big market GM’s and small market GM’s is apples to oranges. Baseball may not have a payroll limit but it has a player limit. Just like poker, you use your money differently when you have the lowest chips and the highest chips.

Am I saying Cashman is a great GM? Of course not, but to say things like what would he be like with an $80 mil payroll is irrelevant, becuase the Yankees will never have an $80 mil payroll again, and Cashman unless fired will probably remain the Yankees GM for quite a while and probably won’t ever be a GM of a team like the Royals or Orioles.

just take a look at what he did last season with the ‘garbage’ he picked up, the yankees ended up being better than boston, whose front office spent more than 400 millions to secure the services of Crawford+Adrián González.

Don’t leave out the Phillies (And I will say Amaro JR. is a very good GM) who won the WS with a $85 million payroll, have increased it every year since and is approximately double then what it is when they last won

Well I love to hate the Giants. One of the greatest rivalries in sports. The Angels just aren’t that exciting to me. It’s probably because there’s not a whole lot going on when you go to an Angels game. The crowd just isn’t that energetic, and although the fans seem mostly knowledgable, they have little intensity. Dodgers, Giants games are filled with intensity and energy. They’re awesome to be a part of.

People would still find a way to call us underdogs and be shocked when we make the playoffs. Truth is, we keep proving, we are one of the better teams and either East would be hard to win (although we’ve done twice in 4 years), the other divisions, we would run away with. That AL West is top heavy these days, imagine the Rays in either Central….

I would LOVE to see a complete realignment of leagues to balance things out, although I know it is wishful thinking. How about this:
AL East
Yankees, Mets, Sox, Phillies, Jays
NL East
Braves, Nationals, Orioles, Rays, Marlins

Oh yeah, just switch the Jays and the Marlins and that’s a pretty good realignment if you ask me. Plus, no way Marlins and Rays could be in the same division. Not enough of the old folks in FL are fans.

If anything, having a limited budget is part of what makes Friedman so successful. If you’re only spending like $50MM annually on payroll, it’s kind of hard to misstep on overpaying a guy.

Credit where credit is due for building such a fantastic farm system, but I’d give the bulk of the credit for their success to the coaching staff, who’ve managed to squeeze the most out of retreads like Kotchman, Pena and Farnsworth, guys who’ve been complete disasters elsewhere.

You have no idea what you are talking about… If he had that money, the team would be winning every year and would not have landed all the talent from the draft….they have to build their teams differently because of past success or lack of….